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Monthly Archives: January 2007

NYC vs. Grand Rapids

January 31, 2007 by james | No Comments | Filed in Life, Urbanism

The New York Times on Monday carried a piece by Robert Sullivan arguing that New York City is falling behind other North American cities (and certainly other major global cities) when it comes to being accessible on foot and by public transport. It rings true, though I don’t know New York well enough to really engage.

Of particular interest is the paragraph that begins:

Then there is Grand Rapids, Mich., which has a walkable downtown with purposely limited parking and is home to a new bus plaza that is part of a mass transit renaissance in Michigan. The state is investing in high-speed trains, and it is even talking about a mass transit system for the nation’s auto-capital, Detroit, where a new pedestrian plaza anchors downtown.

Living here, I can’t say I’d take Grand Rapids as an inspiration for downtown redevelopment. There are a lot of good things happening around the fringes but the city is still far from pedestrian and cyclist friendly, and with a few notable exceptions there’s not yet all that much downtown worth walking to. But still, it’s nice to see Grand Rapids getting a little attention.

(via Kottke’s remaindered links)

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Guillermo Del Toro on NPR

January 24, 2007 by james | No Comments | Filed in Film

Having very much enjoyed Pan’s Labyrinth on Sunday, I was pleased to hear the creative mind behind it, Guillermo Del Toro, interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air this lunchtime. The interview’s a good one and can be heard here.

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DVD Boxsets

January 24, 2007 by james | No Comments | Filed in Television

Writing the other day about West Wing reminded me that I’d meant to throw in a comment on the development of DVD boxsets. Having decided against getting either cable TV or an antenna, we’ve been getting all of our TV on DVD (or through certain other means) for a couple of years now, primarily from netflix or by adding to our collection. In the past few months I’ve begun to notice a new trend.

Up until recently, most boxsets were poorly packaged. While the DVDs themselves contained their fair share of bonus features, the boxes took up considerable space and were far more a means to an end than part of the experience. But lately, probably starting with The Simpsons, that’s begun to change. One of our primary reasons for buying the West Wing set was that the ‘file box’ format was much more compact than the separate seasons. If we were to purchase our Joss Whedon collection now, it would take up about half the space of the volumes we own, and fans of Alias can get all five seasons of that show on 29 DVDs in a very compact package.

That development is likely a result of a critical mass of viewers now consuming TV on DVD, and it’s a welcome one. Taking up less space is good, but people watching TV on DVD are also likely to want more sophisticated programming as we’re better able to follow complex arcs.

It may even mean that some shows that formerly would have died because of network scheduling and the demand for millions of viewers will have a new financial viability, but it’s also likely to demand a new approach to funding. Having seen how much better the deals and packaging are when you wait for a show to finish before buying the DVDs, I’m unlikely in future to rush to buy any show midway through, and if more and more people are watching on DVD then advertising revenue becomes much less a feature. The market will only develop this way if companies are willing to invest over a long-term in order to get their returns. Whether that’s going to happen is one of the big unknowns of the Long Tail.

And the process of working out the presentation is not quite complete. The packaging has improved, but there are still areas where more preparation is necessary. Watching West Wing on DVD, we really don’t need “previously on…” at the start of each episode. There’s no need to cut it, but if it could be its own chapter, we could easily skip it as we do the credits. Maybe that’s just a matter of time, and that will change along with numerous other features. Or maybe it’s evidence that these boxsets are making me lazier?

Oscar Season

January 23, 2007 by james | No Comments | Filed in Film

Listening to the news this morning, with all the build up to today’s Oscar nominations, I was thinking about the blog entry I’d write to lament the fact that Ryan Gosling was cheated out of an Actor In A Leading Role nomination for his part in Half Nelson. I’m very happy to be wrong, and to see him on that list!

It’s an interesting list of nominees this year. Ryan Gosling has been displaced in my ‘cheated’ list with Children Of Men, which really should be up for the sound design awards (and perhaps something higher profile). But it’s good to see Pan’s Labyrinth and The Queen taking such a high profile. I suppose it was inevitable that the Pirates Of The Caribbean franchise would get a nod to appease the big money studios but it’s gratifying to see that they’re limited to technical categories.

It’s tempting to look at some of the nominations and speculate about a breakthrough for independent cinema. Some fantastic ‘indie’ films have broken through this year in a way they haven’t for some time, but looking around the local multiplex I think that that phenomenon is still a limited one. While a film like Pan’s Labyrinth is sitting in the ‘foreign language’ category it seems subtitles still disqualify a film from being ‘best,’ and only a tiny proportion of the population got the chance to see “Half Nelson.”

Those of us who want something other than big budget swashbuckling have a few more options, but most of the money is still going into the same old, same old.

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Cave Of The Yellow Dog

January 22, 2007 by james | No Comments | Filed in Film

Following on from the acclaimed (and Oscar-nominated) The Story Of The Weeping Camel, Byambasuren Davaa‘s new film The Cave Of The Yellow Dog retains the simple premise, quiet pace and flirtations with sentimentality. Following a nomad girl, Nansal, who finds a puppy hiding in the cave and petitions her parents to let her keep him, the film uses its setting to explore the challenges and decisions facing nomadic families in Mongolia as their lifestyle becomes harder to maintain, and parents have to prepare their children for a radically different future.

The film lacks the magical quality of its predecessor, but compensates with fascinating scenes of the family packing up their yurt and arranging their belongings for the seasonal migration. The languorous pace, and chance encounters in the Mongolian hills also added a sense of magic, particularly as we prepare to visit Mongolia this coming summer. That connection won’t help everyone, and some may well find it all a little too twee, but it’s a good way to relax and observe a significantly different culture and landscape.

(For those in Grand Rapids, The Cave Of The Yellow Dog is playing at UICA until Thursday 25th).

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Fair Trade and Global Warming

January 22, 2007 by james | No Comments | Filed in Environment, Trade

With concerns over global warming finally having reached a critical mass in 2006, this year has seen a deluge of blog posts on the subject. A couple of interesting contributions this week have come from “Lunch Over IP”, such as this piece covering a speech on urban design by Sir Norman Foster, and a follow-up to last week’s announcements by Tescos and Marks and Spencers: the “emission labels” and other carbon footprint news.

In the latter, Bruno Giussani raises one of the most significant questions facing those working on poverty reduction in a climate change challenged world:

reducing food miles poses a big ethical and political dilemma: the case for lowering trade barriers with developing countries so that their products can more easily get into northern developed markets is a strong one. Climate change and the rise in CO2 levels completely re-opens it. As Terry Leahy, the CEO of Tesco, poses it: “should we shun fair trade horticulture from East Africa to save CO2, or champion it as an important contribution to alleviating poverty?”

While the concept of ‘lowering trade barriers’ has far too many connotations to be simply supported or opposed, whatever your take on trade regulations this is an issue that needs to be addressed.

Perhaps a good starting point would be for wealthy countries to begin to repair the damage we’ve done by encouraging/forcing developing world farmers to focus on cash crop production over self-sufficiency? If we in affluent communities want to enjoy locally grown food, we need to own up to our own mistakes in using Structural Adjustment and related mechanisms to strip the developing world of that option.

The details will be difficult to work out, but we should look beyond the useful stepping-stone of fair trade, and begin to do more to support farmers and governments who want to return to economic models that feed their people first, and export surplus second.

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West Wing’s Fifth Season

January 20, 2007 by james | Comments Off | Filed in Media and Politics

As a Christmas present, we treated ourselves to the complete West Wing box set. We already owned three seasons on DVD, but the price gap between buying the set and buying the four seasons we were missing was slim enough and the packaging so enticing that we gave in, and have been working our way gradually through it ever since.

Season Five remains, unfortunately, just as weak as I’d remembered. There was some decline in Season Four as Rob Lowe departed and Aaron Sorkin was aware of the impending end of his tenure, but Five was where that really sank in. Too many scenes lack the pace and the intensity of the show’s earlier days, and the writers seem to lack the insight into their characters that viewers expect by this stage. But that’s not what really lets it down for me.

On first viewing I’d thought the show really lost its footing when it tried to be less ideological, more bi-partisan. Revisiting it confirmed that sense. On traditional partisan issues like school vouchers, the older show would not have simply given in but instead would have found a new idea. In Season Five they simply surrender on that, just as they do on so much else.

The one standout episode of the season puts that weakness in sharp relief. Episode 17 (“The Supremes”) sees the Bartlet administration seeking a new Supreme Court Justice and coming to a middle-ground solution that works by re-connecting with many of the show’s previous strengths. They reinforce the oft-lost strengths of partisan politics, by showing that smart people of strikingly different opinions can really engage, and that everyone benefits when they do.

In some ways the show regained some of its earlier power in its final series. They claimed back some of the optimism about what happens when intelligent people engage on issues, and they solved the desires of the new people in control to be bipartisan by following two different candidates. But sadly it never regained its former strength, just like it never returned to that early conviction.

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Cheney Opposed to Iranian Openness?

January 18, 2007 by james | No Comments | Filed in Current affairs, Iran

This is one of those stories that really ought to be huge, but probably won’t make many waves in the US. The BBC’s Newsnight has been told by a former senior US government official:

Tehran proposed ending support for Lebanese and Palestinian militant groups and helping to stabilise Iraq following the US-led invasion.

Offers, including making its nuclear programme more transparent, were conditional on the US ending hostility.

But Vice-President Dick Cheney’s office rejected the plan, the official said.

Obviously there is some doubt about any such source’s motivations, but the letter in which these offers were made has been seen by Newsnight.

With the United States making increasingly hostile moves towards Iran, arresting Iranian officials in Baghdad, and contemplating incursions onto Iranian soil to pursue insurgents, these are alarming times. The United States is vastly over-committed in the Middle East already and with two potential “surges” in the works, would struggle to commit to further actions, but there’s no knowing what these people will try.

It’s long been clear from the administration’s actions to undermine nuclear negotiations between the EU and Iran that they have no real interest in any development that doesn’t involve regime change (probably through military action). But this letter is a far clearer confirmation than any we’ve seen to date and its revelations need urgently to reach a wider audience.

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Wood TV’s WiFi Scare Mongering

January 10, 2007 by james | 2 Comments | Filed in Media and Politics, WiFi

As usual I’m spending some of the morning at Common Ground Coffee Shop. This morning a crew from local news providers, Wood TV 8 channel turned up and filmed those of us making use of the wifi service for a piece they’re preparing on WiFi in the City of Grand Rapids. When they asked to film me, I told them about my WiFi site and they said they may interview me.

But they didn’t. Instead they talked to every other customer using a computer, asking entirely wrong-headed questions about security issues those customers were clearly not all that familiar with. They were suggesting that other customers could be sniffing the network and stealing, for example, banking information. They skipped the fact that every reputable banking site encrypts that data from the web browser to the bank’s server.

There are real issues to be confronted if using WiFi for sensitive work and most people don’t encrypt their email and some usernames/passwords when working on public networks. Software vendors and service providers need to do more to help people learn what and how to encrypt. But most banking sites do a pretty good job of using encryption, as does almost anyone accepting online payments, and it’s not hard for a web user to be shown how to make sure that encryption is being used. And once that’s done you’re probably more at risk from someone watching over your shoulder as from sending the data across the network.

It’s not really that I care to be interviewed by the local (corporate shill) media. It’d be nice to promote a website I work on, but that’s beside the point. What’s really frustrating is having just experienced corporate media scare-mongering so close up but had my offer to clarify the issues rejected. Maybe it’ll all be edited out or someone who understands these things will be invited to comment, but I’m not holding my breath.

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Arcade Fire Craziness

January 9, 2007 by james | No Comments | Filed in Music

I’m already beginning to think I should try and block out all mention of Neon Bible, the new Arcade Fire album, for the next couple of months as not only is it getting heavily hyped in the world of blogs, but it’s getting really well hyped.

For an example, check out the (most likely “V for Vendetta” inspired) video embedded in this post at I Guess I’m Floating. Then head to the band’s site and check out the song “Black Mirror”.

You can also find the video at neonbible.com, but it takes a little more work.